The Fifth Key to Oracle Forms Performance:

Keep Your Stakeholders Aware

(Part Five of a Five-Part Blog Series)

In Part Four we discussed how performance analytics can help you both troubleshoot and plan your rollouts and migrations. In this last part, I want to tackle the monitoring and alerting you’ll need to have in place when your best laid plans and preparation inevitably fall short of reality. As always, I’ll focus on Oracle Forms.

As we mentioned earlier, auto-detection of potential and actual problems is required to have a true monitoring solution — if there are no bells and lights going off when a process is barreling (or about to barrel) out of control, your monitoring system isn’t worth the storage it’s taking up.

The best monitoring scenario would let IT support staff and Help Desk professionals see historical performance issues, real-time issues and potential future threats. It would provide reliable diagnostics prior to upgrade and migration executions, and it would be able to track a single session from the client through to the web server, the application server and the database.

Good performance monitoring and management tools must be able to track the activity of the client through multiple tiers and servers to be effective. They must provide a sufficient level of context to permit the Help Desk professional to ask the right questions.

There are a number of products available today that monitor Forms applications, but they are point solutions and thus miss much of the activity you need to monitor. If you are unaware of problems until they happen, you can’t prevent them or solve them as quickly.

Furthermore, when problems do happen, stakeholders — whether they’re upstream or downstream — can often feel that the system is unreliable. Depending on the severity of the issue and the difficulties involved in troubleshooting it, the competency of the poor IT or Help Desk staffer could even be called into question.

However unwarranted the accusation might be, ultimately, IT is accountable for the upkeep and performance of your Oracle Forms installation — just as the complaining user is responsible for executing the business functions that they rely on Oracle Forms to perform.

The most effective way to turn these dual accountabilities from an adversarial position to a team effort is to keep stakeholders informed so that everyone affected knows what is happening and why. Being able to provide insights into service levels is crucial, whether via dashboards, email reports or other notification methods.